Image by Alain Manesson Malett
This month we present an image will surely prompt some challenging responses. Taken from a 17th Century text, it is an illustration by French artist Alain Manesson Malett of two women in Syria. The image invites questions about identity, perception and the assumptions we make about those who are different from ourselves. And being over 400 years old, this image also reminds us that our quest to understand eachother, to accept and to be accepted is nothing new.
For our lead writers we have a truly itinerant and international line up for you this month, celebrating the fluidity of borders and the dissolving of identity. We begin with a virtuoso piece by Commonwealth Short Story Prize nominated author, Mahesh Rao (http://www.maheshrao.info/) . Mahesh will be in London for the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival, talking about lost lives in short fiction with Preti on May 17th, and closing the festival on May 18th with a discussion of his two recent, critically-acclaimed books in conversation with Sameer Rahim, Literary Editor of Prospect magazine. As if that weren’t enough, his debut novel, ‘The Smoke Is Rising’, won the Tata First Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Crossword Prize – and you read him here first.
Then, heading to the north of England, Jag brings us a debut piece about forbidden love. Jag is self-described as queer, genderqueer, northern, disabled and neurodiverse. Despite very little formal education, Jag is emerging as a promising young British writer. Now with an agent and with the editing of a first novel underway, we look forward to reading more.
Finally, from the UK to Australia via India and back – our third offering this month is by Ryn Cowcroft. Ryn won the John Kinsella Poetry Prize and her poems have appeared in The Best Australian Poems anthology, The Australian Review, and other publications. She is currently working on a collection and we are delighted to publish her before she gets even busier.
We invite you to look carefully at this image, inside and outside the frame, and study the detail. This is a complex visual that we hope inspires a kind of writing that you may not have thought was in you.
Over to you, dear writers – enjoy.
Kristen and Preti
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